On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider legislation aimed at reining in abusive patent litigation. But one of the bill's most important provisions, designed to make it easier to nix low-quality software patents, will be left on the cutting room floor. That provision was the victim of an aggressive lobbying campaign by patent-rich software companies such as IBM and Microsoft.

These companies also happen to have the largest lobbying corruption budgets. This is never going to change.

Patents I guess you could say were originally designed to protect invention (some might say intellectual property) so that new "things" could be brought to market effectively without fear of being "stolen" by somebody that was bigger and more powerful than the originator.

Unfortunately, now, if you create a patent, it's likely that any attempt to bring that "invention" to market would likely step on other patents, which means the only hope is to sell out to a bigger patent holder. This seems to be how it usually goes.

So.. here's my proposal. Make the lifetime of the patent be variable based on the "size" (however that is determined) of the patent holder (the true holder not someone licensing). Thus the "little" guy now has a better chance of bring something to market since it's likely that patents that would be used to coerce/force sale of they guy's patent might be expired.

Something has got to be done. Right now, the likes of IBM are gearing up for an ultimate technology war.. where the survivor is the one with the most patents... and can I say, this was not the intention of the patent system?